It may have been Clark Kent who inspired this columnist to work for newspapers, but it was Mary Brown who gave him a reason to keep doing so. Don’t know the name? Mary didn’t have a byline in the publications of the vanished Cape Cod Newspapers, whose Cape Cod News circulated in Barnstable. Nor was her name seen over stories in The Cape Codder, The Register, or her own town’s Harwich Oracle. Yet she took responsibility for what appeared in these and other publications just as much as any of their editors, publishers, and reporters. Mary Brown, who died this month at 87 – still working two days a week at the Codder in Orleans – was a copy editor. Her vocation was simple and daunting: to see that everything was right. Doing that was hard enough in the stories she vetted and the pages she marked up, but Mary took her vocation to the limit, doing more than her share to ensure that everything was right in her workplace and among her colleagues. In a profession plagued with cynics, Mary Brown made it cool to care.

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Among our favorite bits of advice to graduates last month was this passage from Falmouth Enterprise columnist Troy Clarkson: “I’ve learned to take nothing for granted, and to never doubt the power of ideas. When I graduated from FHS more than 20 years ago, there were no iPods, laptops, e-mails or microwave popcorn. Polaroids were the closest thing to digital cameras, wind power was found in convertibles with the top down, and you did your research at the library or at the house of a neighbor, who had an updated set of encyclopedias. On the other hand, I’ve learned that good pizza is timeless.”

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Water pistols have met their Waterloo in Sandwich. “Town Will Ban Water Fights From July 4 Parade” was the Enterprise headline (and a good thing, too, as readers had to wait until graf 14 to discover that Recreation Director Guy J. Boucher “is endeavoring to put the kibosh on the water fights this year”). A longtime resident said she’s seen a super-squirt gun knock a 2-year-old off his scooter. “I’m not being a stiff,” she told the paper, “but I don’t think white-haired old ladies and small children should have to be subjected to this.”

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Pushback at the polls on wastewater projects continued on Cape Cod in May when three-time challenger John Hodgson of Orleans handily defeated incumbent selectman Margie Fulcher. As The Cape Codder put it, “Wastewater and whether the town would stay with a more traditional sewage system built around a large plant or look for smaller alternatives, was a driving force in the election, Hodgson said, but it wasn’t the only factor.” In Yarmouth, said The Register, Norman Holcomb, a “relative newcomer,” defeated longtime selectman Suzanne McAuliffe, a supporter of a wastewater treatment plan defeated in an earlier election. Both Hodgson and Holcomb served on their towns’ finance committees.

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At 93, Kendrick Matthews came back to Harwich for a visit. Decades ago, The Cape Codder said, he helped his Uncle Harold, a water commissioner, find the town’s first and still best-producing well by witching with a willow branch. “It had to be green,” recalled current water commissioner Allin Thompson. “I could never make it happen; it was miraculous.”

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Our guess as to why Barnstable Bear crossed the Canal is that he wanted to say “Hi” to Leslie Reynolds, the new chief ranger at the Cape Cod National Seashore. Her reputation in circles human and ursine precedes her; previously, she enforced the rules in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park and at Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. “Bears are quite common in all those parks,” she told The Cape Codder. “It was not uncommon for me to see a bear once a week.”

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Taking some time off from involvement in state and local politics, Provincetown’s Nate Mayo spent last year in Japan teaching English. Of his attempts to master the local language, Mayo told the Banner, “I learned the phrase ‘O-susume wa-nan desu ka,’ or ‘What do you recommend?’ It led me to ramen that tasted like silk and perfectly grilled fish, cow innards with the texture of leather and sauce with the texture of mucous. Always an experience.”

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Big Brother in little Truro? Townspeople are complaining about being spied on by motion-activated police cameras at the transfer station, elementary school, DPW, and the police station. The town administrator said the images are recorded, not monitored live, and are viewed only after a crime is reported.

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Sarah Wilcox, an Eastham native who started working at the Superette general store when she was 14, burst into tears in May when selectmen transferred the license for the business to her husband and herself. “I’m trying hard not to cry,” she said, “but this has been 22 years in the making.” At the rear of the room, The Cape Codder reported, Cape Cod National Seashore Supt. George Price was in tears, too. “I was not born here,” he said, “but I’ve been going to the Superette for 37 years.”

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Potatoes that look like W.C. Fields? Sure. A rock that looks like Edvard Munch’s “The Scream?” You’re kidding! But the evidence was on the front page of The Falmouth Enterprise, held by rock collector and former art teacher Ruth Allenby, who found the stone near her home. With the recent publicity regarding the sale of one of Munch’s painted “Scream” canvases for $119.9 million, Allenby decided that the anonymous buyer would want to snatch up her rock to make a set.

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As summer approached, the Provincetown police issued a reminder that drinking and walking are frowned upon at the Cape tip. It’s “illegal to walk out the door of a guest house, inn or restaurant with open cups containing alcohol,” The Cape Codder reported.

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Thanks to Meg Costello for her wonderful article in The Falmouth Enterprise about John Tobey, who captained the schooner Union in the early 1800s. She starts off by putting readers alongside Tobey as he makes his rounds in 1810, buying sails and picking up cordage, jugs, and oil while dropping two dollars on a gallon of brandy for his ship. Tobey paid his bills with everything from watermelons to eels. Costello concludes by noting that Tobey is buried next to the East Falmouth Post Office, where she imagines workers are grateful that “nobody ever tells a creditor, ‘Relax – the eels are in the mail.’”

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It’s a victory for the entrepreneur in all of us. When Rob Mador of Harwich tried to operate his mobile food truck at the Exit 10 parking lot off Route 6, the state “ran him off,” as The Cape Cod Chronicle put it. But Mador won a four-month lease under a pilot program, and has ambitions to franchise the trucks nationwide. He makes a point of hiring returning war veterans and disabled vets.

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Foxes and folk coexist uneasily in the high season. Lorial Russell, animal control officer for Wellfleet and Truro, told the Provincetown Banner that she got a call from a woman who had spotted one of the savvy hunters when she arrived to open a house for the summer. “She wanted me to hunt it down,” Russell said. “I said, ‘Do you realize that fox has been going through your yard all winter long? It’s as shocked to see you as you are to see it.’”

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Credit Chatham for looking back farther than just 300 years as it commemorates its 300th anniversary. The community’s Native American heritage is front and center, thanks in part to members of the Chatham Wampanoag Circle. The Cape Cod Chronicle has been carrying a series by Circle member Jill James detailing daily life in the area before the European occupation and settlement. In May, selectmen named a pond in honor of Mattaquason, sachem of the village once known as Manamoit.

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Any writer who’s suffered at the hands of a meddling editor would have loved Andrew Buckley’s recent column in The Cape Cod Chronicle. Buckley wrote that he was profiled in a magazine by Jennifer Sexton, with whom he has no quarrel. Problem is, the editor changed Sexton’s copy to make Buckley a selectman, which he hasn’t been in a decade. The editor also changed Sexton’s correct spelling of Buckley’s daughter’s name. As H.G. Wells put it, “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

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Barnstable Bear would have enjoyed a visit also with recently retired Cape Cod Community College President Kathy Schatzberg, who told The Register that she’s planning a cross-country trip with her dog, Ted E. Bear, and wants to stop at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Park in Michigan. “I have a thing for bears,” she said.